Lewiston-based singer-songwriter Mark Holt knows the audience is likely to sing along at some point when he performs John Denver’s classic “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”
What he didn’t expect one recent night was for the crowd, feeling the energy of a live show, to belt out the full song.
“I get about three lines into it, and everybody starts singing,” Holt said. “I backed away from the mic, and the entire room was singing ‘Country Roads’ with me.”
Holt has long valued performing live music, but resuming gigs after a frustrating pandemic hiatus drove home just how important it is.
“The shutdown was not good for people’s creativity,” he said. “It wasn’t healthy.”
If he ever took the power of live performance for granted, he won’t do so again.
“This really proves that people miss going out and being together and interacting with each other,” he said. “It was pretty magical.”
Holt’s nearly 50-year career has taken him to points throughout the country and the world, and now that venues are opening back up, he’s looking forward to seeing some of that reach again.
“I’m just so happy and glad to be out playing music again,” he said. “The pandemic shutdown, I basically had a little over a year off. Most of it I didn’t have a choice. My venues were closed, and some of them never did reopen.”
Holt, who was born in Seattle and grew up in the Lower Yakima Valley, moved to Idaho in the early ’90s. He lived in Clearwater County for a while and has been in Lewiston about 10 years.
“I present myself as a national act, and I just happen to live here in Lewiston — that’s the way I look at it,” he said.
He has rubbed elbows with a long list of industry greats and performed with several of them, starting when he was in high school and got a call from Sonny Osborne of the Osborne Brothers (“Rocky Top”), looking for connections in the Pacific Northwest bluegrass scene.
He has since met a host of country music legends, including Ernest Tubb, Boxcar Willie, Marty Robbins, Merle Haggard and Don Williams and had the chance to work with multi-Grammy-winning acoustic music producer and sound engineer Bil VornDick.
About a decade ago, he was traveling with his sister in her Subaru Forester and got the idea for a song.
“I wrote something: ‘Whether it’s a train, a plane or my trusty old Subaru, I always get to where I need to be,’ ” he said.
“Just for the heck of it,” he sent it to Subaru.
“They got back to me and said, ‘This is really cool.’ ”
It led to a 2014 story in Subaru’s Drive magazine, an invite to Lake Tahoe to perform at a Subaru-sponsored ski race and a Seattle gig playing at the launch of a new Subaru line.
The “Subaru thing,” he said, “continues to be good to me.”
Another song that surprised him with its traction, “Ronnie and Me,” has a more serious bent. It started when his wife and her best friend were joking about how they’d be in a nursing home someday, and even if they didn’t remember each other they’d still be having fun together.
“I tried to do that (with a song), but every time I tried to do it, it sounded stupid,” Holt said. “The song took more of a serious, darker lean to it.”
His own father was beginning to have some memory issues, and he’d had family members with early dementia.
What started as kidding around “kind of evolved into being a PSA about Alzheimer’s and dementia,” he said.
The song’s accompanying video, produced by filmmaker David Walk and filmed in part at the Idaho State Veterans Home in Lewiston, was recognized by the Idaho Film Industry in July 2020 and screened at the Colossal Cinematic Showcase, an event honoring Idaho filmmakers.
“Once you send something out into the world, you never know how it’s going to be perceived,” he said. “It really surprised me how much response ‘Ronnie and Me’ got.”
Holt’s next local performance is set for 4 p.m. March 5 at Rivaura Estate Vineyard and Winery near Juliaetta.
It’s another opportunity to revel in the connections live perform
ances create for both the artist and audience, and a reminder that the experience isn’t always a given.
“I believe that everybody is given a gift. For me, it’s playing music. Whatever your gift is, whatever your thing is, you have a responsibility to take that gift out into the world and try to use it for good,” Holt said. “When we lost the ability to be creative — I don’t think that’s healthy.”
Stone can be reached at mstone@inland360.com.
